Is Your SaaS Environment Geared For Consistency?

Consistency in a SaaS environment is imperative. It makes it makes supporting those environments easier for both Rackspace and for our customers.

Regardless of the number of servers you have, maintaining consistency in your hardware and how you name it is essential to supporting scale and running an efficient IT operation. Your gear should be consistent in the following areas:

Hardware and Operating System
If you have hardware from multiple brands, all with different software, different operating systems and different components, just trying to figure out what and where a problem is and how to fix it for a particular machine can be a nightmare. By standardizing on the same hardware and operating system throughout your infrastructure, makes quirks easier to recognize, troubleshoot and fix. This also gives us the ability to quickly add new identical hardware to your hosted SaaS environment when needed without worrying about how, or if, it will impact other pieces of your infrastructure.

Server Naming Conventions
Ideally, you’d name your servers to be memorable and informative for IT and end users. If you have a one-man shop, and your one man leaves his position, will the next admin be able to decipher that server’s purpose by its name?

Consistency in your environment paves the way for a stronger relationship and makes it easier for us to help you achieve your SaaS-related goals.

About the Author

This is a post written and contributed by
Kevin Holmes.

Kevin Holmes is a Senior Linux Systems Engineer working in Rackspace Enterprise, specializing in high performance web serving. Kevin has been serving Rackspace customers for close to 10 years in various technical roles. He also pretends to know how to play drums.